News - Midlands
Time to talk
If you want to see the future of mobile communications, just look into Gary Corbett's empty hands.
In the midst of our interview over lunch at a Birmingham restaurant he interweaves his fingers to give the impression of how large he thinks the average mobile will be within the next few years. Bigger - the width of a couple of hand spans - but also far more powerful, far more adaptable and far more ubiquitous.
"What you need to think of is something looking like Sony's Playstation Portable, namely a large flat screen that brings together almost everything except a phone into a handset. And then think of something like Nokia's new phone, launched in January, which has wi-fi that allows you near-broadband services to your mobile. Put them together (he interweaves his fingers) and you've got convergence. It means huge changes in the way we use mobile communications."
This may be a mantra that we are hearing ad nauseam in today's hi-tech world, but Corbett's opinions carry more weight than most. After all here is a man who spotted the growth potential of texting - which in turn helped him develop a multi-million pound business - long before most.
"Increasingly conversations and messages will be video-based rather than just sound or text. We're also going to do a lot less dialling because voice-recognition technology will become more important. You'll call someone by speaking their name into the mobile. This will have major implications in the design of mobile technology and software, as keypads start to disappear. In a few years your kids will look at you in disbelief when you say "we used to use keyboards'."
And that, according to Corbett, is where things start to get really interesting for mobile users - which nowadays means all of us - with changes that will make the Blackberry look as modern as a Sinclair ZX80.
He adds: "Everybody now has a mobile, in some shape or form. What we're going to see in the very near future is people watching television programmes, surfing the web and doing Internet shopping through their mobiles - probably within a couple of years. If you think that's fast you need to remember that just five years ago there were no downloadable ring tones, no downloadable games, no video on phones. Even texting wasn't that common - the networks hadn't developed the cross-links that allowed customers to text people on different networks."
Five years ago Opera itself barely existed too. The year before Corbett himself had made the best decision of his life when as part of a management team at internet service provider Telinco he benefited from its £3250m sale to World Online, now part of Tiscali. As he remembers: "We sold at exactly the right time, more by accident than design. Like everyone else we thought the dotcom boom would go on forever."
Rather than seek early retirement Corbett, who had begun his career with BT in Birmingham, set up Opera which originally began by re-selling non-geographic and premium-rate phone numbers. His brainwave though was to invest £3750,000 in an SMS gateway, technology that would allow his fledgling company to send text messages across mobile operators' networks.
The rest, as they say, is history. In just three months Corbett had his money back. Today Opera turns over more than £3100m.
But despite the extraordinary revolution in mobile content, Corbett says phone companies still need some prodding. "Traditionally phone companies have been interested in networks, but that's not where the future lies. The future is in content.
"The idea for Opera came from a chat with a friend at Vodafone who said there wasn't much interest among the big phone companies about mobile content.
The timing was superb because we'd just sold Telinco and I had funds available."
Corbett says Opera's success is built on the belief that mobile communications are driven by content rather than hardware or systems.
"The idea of Opera, and it's not a particularly complex one, was to make it easy for companies and their customers to talk to each other by mobiles in as many different ways as they could by providing a white label service - an off the shelf product that people could adapt to suit their own needs. We provide the infrastructure that lets customers run mobile campaigns like competitions, games, quizzes and news bulletins that they can brand and present as their own. The beauty is its simplicity - it's a website based service that lets users alter it as they see fit. At the most basic level you could have, for example, a radio DJ who is handed something he can give away as a prize. Using the website he can create a competition while The Beach Boys are playing and put together an SMS competition before the track has ended."
Getting people to try out the range of services hasn't been difficult because they are web-based and the entry level for each customer is so low. "We share revenue rather than charging a flat rate - so customers could try it with little risk.
In addition, I had lots of contacts from working within the industry for 20 years."
Looking ahead, Corbett believes mobile information will become increasingly localised. For example if you are in town looking for a restaurant or a cafe, your mobile will tell you where to go and what offers are available today. Need a new alternator for the car? Your mobile will tell you where the nearest suppliers are and what the price will be.
Issuing this sort of information will become so important that we will see advertisers paying to push it onto our mobiles, rather than us paying to receive it.
Corbett adds: "There were a couple of interesting announcements over Christmas when a number of big corporations, including Coca-Cola, said they'd be spending more on marketing via mobiles rather than television. It makes sense now that there are far more mobile phones than TVs or PCs. Although most of the immediate implications are for business to consumer routes, new mobile technology will have major implications for businesses to business communications. It will mean sales staff sending reports and picking up information in the field rather than returning to the office, and greater tracking of the movements of both employees and goods. You may get emails saying "the package will be with you in ten minutes'."
By keeping entry levels low and its systems simple, Opera has been able to internationalise quickly. Technology means the 100-odd staff at the company's headquarters in Nechells, Birmingham, can handle data from anywhere in the world - with a minimum of sales and marketing staff employed overseas in cities like Washington, Madrid, Sydney and Cape Town.
Adds Corbett: "In many ways Opera's business model is very similar to Telinco's - a low entry level for customers to a potentially mass market, and providing a platform. The biggest headache and cost for any business is your staff. Actually my ideal - though I'll never get it - would be a firm with no people, just a couple of big servers humming quietly away."
So what now, where does Corbett go from here? Many are watching the company closely amid speculation over a sale. Corbett will not be drawn into specifics, but it is clear that, after five years of being funded from its own coffers, Corbett is looking to outside funding to help continue the company's spectacular growth.
In its last financial year Opera achieved pre-tax profits of £36m on the back of a £399m turnover, both figures being more than double those of two years previously.
Corbett admits he is looking at bringing in outside finance, and possibly spreading the company's shareholding, to fund international expansion.
"The company is debt free, I've never borrowed a penny to finance it. It paid for its initial investment within the first three months, and since then we've been self-financing. If we wanted to grow we'd invest from our own resources, and if we could not afford a project it would have to wait. Thats the way I like running my businesses, it gives me huge flexibility.
"But now would be a good time to bring other people on board. Opera is no longer a small business and I can't afford to run it as one. We need to think internationally, and our strategy needs to be different."
Corbett has already had discussions with various parties about potential funding sources, including banks and venture capitalists, and is also looking at a flotation.
Corbett genuinely appears not to have made his mind up yet, although it is his intention to decide sometime this year.
He adds: "We've had plenty of offers over the past few years and now we're having conversations in that area. There's a lot of money floating around the telecom market at the moment."
In the midst of our interview over lunch at a Birmingham restaurant he interweaves his fingers to give the impression of how large he thinks the average mobile will be within the next few years. Bigger - the width of a couple of hand spans - but also far more powerful, far more adaptable and far more ubiquitous.
"What you need to think of is something looking like Sony's Playstation Portable, namely a large flat screen that brings together almost everything except a phone into a handset. And then think of something like Nokia's new phone, launched in January, which has wi-fi that allows you near-broadband services to your mobile. Put them together (he interweaves his fingers) and you've got convergence. It means huge changes in the way we use mobile communications."
This may be a mantra that we are hearing ad nauseam in today's hi-tech world, but Corbett's opinions carry more weight than most. After all here is a man who spotted the growth potential of texting - which in turn helped him develop a multi-million pound business - long before most.
"Increasingly conversations and messages will be video-based rather than just sound or text. We're also going to do a lot less dialling because voice-recognition technology will become more important. You'll call someone by speaking their name into the mobile. This will have major implications in the design of mobile technology and software, as keypads start to disappear. In a few years your kids will look at you in disbelief when you say "we used to use keyboards'."
And that, according to Corbett, is where things start to get really interesting for mobile users - which nowadays means all of us - with changes that will make the Blackberry look as modern as a Sinclair ZX80.
He adds: "Everybody now has a mobile, in some shape or form. What we're going to see in the very near future is people watching television programmes, surfing the web and doing Internet shopping through their mobiles - probably within a couple of years. If you think that's fast you need to remember that just five years ago there were no downloadable ring tones, no downloadable games, no video on phones. Even texting wasn't that common - the networks hadn't developed the cross-links that allowed customers to text people on different networks."
Five years ago Opera itself barely existed too. The year before Corbett himself had made the best decision of his life when as part of a management team at internet service provider Telinco he benefited from its £3250m sale to World Online, now part of Tiscali. As he remembers: "We sold at exactly the right time, more by accident than design. Like everyone else we thought the dotcom boom would go on forever."
Rather than seek early retirement Corbett, who had begun his career with BT in Birmingham, set up Opera which originally began by re-selling non-geographic and premium-rate phone numbers. His brainwave though was to invest £3750,000 in an SMS gateway, technology that would allow his fledgling company to send text messages across mobile operators' networks.
The rest, as they say, is history. In just three months Corbett had his money back. Today Opera turns over more than £3100m.
But despite the extraordinary revolution in mobile content, Corbett says phone companies still need some prodding. "Traditionally phone companies have been interested in networks, but that's not where the future lies. The future is in content.
"The idea for Opera came from a chat with a friend at Vodafone who said there wasn't much interest among the big phone companies about mobile content.
The timing was superb because we'd just sold Telinco and I had funds available."
Corbett says Opera's success is built on the belief that mobile communications are driven by content rather than hardware or systems.
"The idea of Opera, and it's not a particularly complex one, was to make it easy for companies and their customers to talk to each other by mobiles in as many different ways as they could by providing a white label service - an off the shelf product that people could adapt to suit their own needs. We provide the infrastructure that lets customers run mobile campaigns like competitions, games, quizzes and news bulletins that they can brand and present as their own. The beauty is its simplicity - it's a website based service that lets users alter it as they see fit. At the most basic level you could have, for example, a radio DJ who is handed something he can give away as a prize. Using the website he can create a competition while The Beach Boys are playing and put together an SMS competition before the track has ended."
Getting people to try out the range of services hasn't been difficult because they are web-based and the entry level for each customer is so low. "We share revenue rather than charging a flat rate - so customers could try it with little risk.
In addition, I had lots of contacts from working within the industry for 20 years."
Looking ahead, Corbett believes mobile information will become increasingly localised. For example if you are in town looking for a restaurant or a cafe, your mobile will tell you where to go and what offers are available today. Need a new alternator for the car? Your mobile will tell you where the nearest suppliers are and what the price will be.
Issuing this sort of information will become so important that we will see advertisers paying to push it onto our mobiles, rather than us paying to receive it.
Corbett adds: "There were a couple of interesting announcements over Christmas when a number of big corporations, including Coca-Cola, said they'd be spending more on marketing via mobiles rather than television. It makes sense now that there are far more mobile phones than TVs or PCs. Although most of the immediate implications are for business to consumer routes, new mobile technology will have major implications for businesses to business communications. It will mean sales staff sending reports and picking up information in the field rather than returning to the office, and greater tracking of the movements of both employees and goods. You may get emails saying "the package will be with you in ten minutes'."
By keeping entry levels low and its systems simple, Opera has been able to internationalise quickly. Technology means the 100-odd staff at the company's headquarters in Nechells, Birmingham, can handle data from anywhere in the world - with a minimum of sales and marketing staff employed overseas in cities like Washington, Madrid, Sydney and Cape Town.
Adds Corbett: "In many ways Opera's business model is very similar to Telinco's - a low entry level for customers to a potentially mass market, and providing a platform. The biggest headache and cost for any business is your staff. Actually my ideal - though I'll never get it - would be a firm with no people, just a couple of big servers humming quietly away."
So what now, where does Corbett go from here? Many are watching the company closely amid speculation over a sale. Corbett will not be drawn into specifics, but it is clear that, after five years of being funded from its own coffers, Corbett is looking to outside funding to help continue the company's spectacular growth.
In its last financial year Opera achieved pre-tax profits of £36m on the back of a £399m turnover, both figures being more than double those of two years previously.
Corbett admits he is looking at bringing in outside finance, and possibly spreading the company's shareholding, to fund international expansion.
"The company is debt free, I've never borrowed a penny to finance it. It paid for its initial investment within the first three months, and since then we've been self-financing. If we wanted to grow we'd invest from our own resources, and if we could not afford a project it would have to wait. Thats the way I like running my businesses, it gives me huge flexibility.
"But now would be a good time to bring other people on board. Opera is no longer a small business and I can't afford to run it as one. We need to think internationally, and our strategy needs to be different."
Corbett has already had discussions with various parties about potential funding sources, including banks and venture capitalists, and is also looking at a flotation.
Corbett genuinely appears not to have made his mind up yet, although it is his intention to decide sometime this year.
He adds: "We've had plenty of offers over the past few years and now we're having conversations in that area. There's a lot of money floating around the telecom market at the moment."